{"agent_id":"hall","agent_name":"G. Stanley Hall","slug":"recapitulation","label":"Recapitulation: does the development of the individual mind repeat the mental history of the race?","topic":"Recapitulation","question":"Does the development of the individual mind repeat the mental history of the race?","position":"The soul has a history far longer than the individual who bears it. Each of us begins not as a blank page but as the heir of an immense ancestral past, and in growing up we climb again, stage by stage, the long stairway the race has climbed before us. The infant's clutching reflex, the boy's passion for collecting and for the wild, his cruelties and his fears — of high places, of deep water, of the dark, of strange men — are not the products of his little life; no child has met the saber-tooth, yet the fear is there, ready-made. These are reminiscences, vestiges of adaptations our forefathers made across geological ages, surfacing on their appointed schedule in the growing child. This is what I mean by the genetic method and by recapitulation: that ontogeny repeats phylogeny in the mind as the embryologists showed it does in the body, and that to understand the child we must read in him the epochs of the race — the animal, the savage, the nomad, the settled tiller of the soil — each leaving its deposit in a stage of childhood. The child is the key to the race's past, and the race's past the key to the child.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The soul has a history far longer than the individual who bears it.","n":[]},{"t":"Each of us begins not as a blank page but as the heir of an immense ancestral past, and in growing up we climb again, stage by stage, the long stairway the race has climbed before us.","n":[]},{"t":"The infant's clutching reflex, the boy's passion for collecting and for the wild, his cruelties and his fears — of high places, of deep water, of the dark, of strange men — are not the products of his little life; no child has met the saber-tooth, yet the fear is there, ready-made.","n":[]}],[{"t":"These are reminiscences, vestiges of adaptations our forefathers made across geological ages, surfacing on their appointed schedule in the growing child.","n":[]},{"t":"This is what I mean by the genetic method and by recapitulation: that ontogeny repeats phylogeny in the mind as the embryologists showed it does in the body, and that to understand the child we must read in him the epochs of the race — the animal, the savage, the nomad, the settled tiller of the soil — each leaving its deposit in a stage of childhood.","n":[1]},{"t":"The child is the key to the race's past, and the race's past the key to the child.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Adolescence (2 vols., 1904 — the systematic statement of genetic psychology); Aspects of Child Life and Education (1907); Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906). Reception: the abandonment of recapitulation by biology (the fall of Lamarckism, the rise of Mendelian genetics) and by psychology; Freud's and Jung's parallel uses of a phylogenetic unconscious; the survival of a chastened developmental-stage idea in Piaget and others without the racial-history content.","works":["Adolescence (2 vols., 1904 — the systematic statement of genetic psychology)","Aspects of Child Life and Education (1907)","Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906)"],"reception":"the abandonment of recapitulation by biology (the fall of Lamarckism, the rise of Mendelian genetics) and by psychology; Freud's and Jung's parallel uses of a phylogenetic unconscious; the survival of a chastened developmental-stage idea in Piaget and others without the racial-history content.","status":"Recapitulation was the organizing theory of Hall's whole psychology and the foundation of the child-study and developmental movements, but as biology it collapsed within a generation of Adolescence. It required the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), which Mendelian genetics and the Weismann barrier ruled out; and as psychology its stage-parallels between child and \"savage\" were untestable and shaped by the racial assumptions of the age. What survived, stripped of the racial- history content, is the more general and defensible idea that development proceeds through an ordered sequence of qualitatively distinct stages — an idea that reappears, on quite different foundations, in Freud, in Jung's phylogenetic unconscious, and above all in Piaget. Hall's specific doctrine is a discarded theory; the developmental frame it helped establish is permanent.","era":"1844-1924","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Aspects of Child Life and Education","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Amulets, charms, lucky stones, everything that we call by the familiar term of tnascot^ partakes of the nature of a fetich. Through some fancied potency not to be f oimd among its physical qualities it is believed to bring us good fortune.\" Recapitulation of the Race in the Child The old saying that parents live again in their children is no less true than that the child lives again the history of the race.","label":"Aspects of Child Life and Education"},{"n":2,"work":"Adolescence Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We must go to school to the folk-soul, learn of criminals and defectives, animals, and in some sense go back to Aristotle 1* viii THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE in rebasing psychology on biology, and realize that we know the soul best when we can best write its history in the world, and that there are no finalities save formulae of development.","label":"Adolescence Vol 1"},{"n":3,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The automatic or ancestral and the plastic and adaptive constantly interact and influence each other, the former predominating most in animals, but also profoundly influencing man.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":4,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We must recognize that some of them are our superiors in certain respects; that while we explain them by explication of those traits wherein we excel, they no whit less explain us by those of their traits which are superior to ours and of which our souls contain only relics; that if in general we are their realized entelechy, they are the key by which alone we can unlock many of the mysteries of our own origin and…","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"adolescence-as-storm-and-stress","label":"Adolescence as storm and stress: is the turbulence of youth a biological necessity of development?"},{"slug":"the-education-of-women","label":"The education of women: ought the sexes to be educated differently because they differ by nature?"},{"slug":"the-psychology-of-religion","label":"The psychology of religion: is religious experience a natural phenomenon of development to be studied genetically?"}]}